Selligent to Panoply

This page provides you with instructions on how to extract data from Selligent and load it into Panoply. (If this manual process sounds onerous, check out Stitch, which can do all the heavy lifting for you in just a few clicks.)

What is Selligent?

What is Panoply?

Panoply can spin up a new Amazon Redshift instance in just a few clicks. Panoply's managed data warehouse service uses machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to learn, model, and automate data management activities from source to analysis. It can import data with no schema, no modeling, and no configuration, and lets you use analysis, SQL, and visualization tools just as you would if you were creating a Redshift data warehouse on your own.

Getting data out of Selligent

Selligent exposes data on programs, transactional mailings, and data sources via an API. We weren't able to find any online documentation on using Selligent's API, so you'll have to work closely with the company to create code to access your data.

Loading data into Panoply

When you've identified all of the columns you want to insert, use the Reshift CREATE TABLE statement to create a table in your data warehouse to receive all the data.

Once you have a table built, it may seem like the easiest way to replicate your data (especially if there isn't much of it) is to build INSERT statements to add data to your Redshift table row by row. If you have any experience with SQL, this probably will be your first inclination. Think again! Redshift isn't optimized for inserting data one row at a time. If you have a high volume of data to be inserted, you should load the data into Amazon S3 and then use the COPY command to load it into Redshift.

Keeping Selligent data up to date

At this point you've coded up a script or written a program to get the data you want and successfully moved it into your data warehouse. But how will you load new or updated data? It's not a good idea to replicate all of your data each time you have updated records. That process would be painfully slow and resource-intensive.

Instead, identify key fields that your script can use to bookmark its progression through the data and use to pick up where it left off as it looks for updated data. Auto-incrementing fields such as updated_at or created_at work best for this. When you've built in this functionality, you can set up your script as a cron job or continuous loop to get new data as it appears in Selligent.

And remember, as with any code, once you write it, you have to maintain it. If Selligent modifies its API, or the API sends a field with a datatype your code doesn't recognize, you may have to modify the script. If your users want slightly different information, you definitely will have to.

Other data warehouse options

Panoply is great, but sometimes you need to optimize for different things when you're choosing a data warehouse. Some folks choose to go with Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, or Snowflake, which are RDBMSes that use similar SQL syntax. If you're interested in seeing the relevant steps for loading data into one of these platforms, check out To Redshift, To BigQuery, To Postgres, and To Snowflake.

Easier and faster alternatives

If all this sounds a bit overwhelming, don’t be alarmed. If you have all the skills necessary to go through this process, chances are building and maintaining a script like this isn’t a very high-leverage use of your time.

Thankfully, products like Stitch were built to solve this problem automatically. With just a few clicks, Stitch starts extracting your Selligent data via the API, structuring it in a way that is optimized for analysis, and inserting that data into your Panoply data warehouse.